Purchase of stock shows in Transactions, shares not added to Portfolio

ronholl1

I believe I have seen this once before and don't remember how I got around it as I haven't been able to do this time. I have also seen something similar reported in 2018.

I entered the BUY transaction manually, entering the symbol, total amount and number of shares. The balance decreases by that amount which causes my total account value to decrease by that amount.

I'm running Version 6.2.2 (Build 602.39004.100) on macOS 11.4.

Here are more details on what is happening, seems very odd.

2/1/2021 Purchased 100 shares of an ETF
3/30/2021 Dividends .3 shares
6/29/2021 Dividends .3 shares
7/7/2020 Purchased 48 shares of same ETF

Portfolio now reflects a total of 100.6 shares (instead of 148.6 shares) as follows:

2/1/2021 52 shares
3/30/2021 .3 shares
6/29/2021 .3 shares
7/7/2020 48 shares

When I delete the BUY transaction, the 2/1/2021 purchase goes back to 100 shares.

Maybe when this transaction comes in for download, it will be ok but I should be able to manually enter a transaction.

Hoping someone can help me, otherwise I will check with the quicken phone support.

Thanks.

ronholl1

Thanks for the response. I have never really understood placeholder entries in my old Windows version that had tons of them that I could never resolve and always wished Quicken did not generate. I don't think I have them now although this does seem like it.

A couple of things about this.

1. When the transaction came in yesterday in the download, it added the shares and did not take from the initial purchase. The transaction looks just like what I had entered.
2. The original transaction does not say Placeholder any place. The memo has a message from the financial institution, "YOU BOUGHT".

It just doesn't make sense to me that this would be a placeholder as it seems like a normal transaction.

Is this a placeholder and if so, how did it get there and how can I resolve it and find others? Answer might be in the article you sent which needs a bit more digesting.

ronholl1

Thank you again and I think I can say nearly absolutely no placeholders unless Quicken chooses to completely hide that fact from me.

For this security, there is literally 4 transactions, none if which are placeholders. When I click on the transaction and "more info", it shows the date entered and the date posted, which are the same. I also searched all accounts for the word "placeholder". There were a bunch prior to 2012 on old accounts (drove me nuts in my Quicken Windows days as I could never resolve them so kept hundreds of them) but none since 2012.

This does behave like a placeholder but I don't at all see how that could be the case. I am thinking there is something more wrong here and I do appreciate your assistance.

ronholl1

RickO, it's not at all painful to audit all the transactions for the security as there are literally 4 transactions for this security, the initial purchase, 2 reinvested dividends and the new purchase. They all match the website and nothing odd except that the manually entered last purchase removes shares from the first purchase when manually entered. When downloaded, it is fine.

This can be easily recreated as I just added a test transaction to buy 10 shares and it decreased the initial purchase by 10 shares. How can the initial purchase have been a placeholder if the transaction has no indication and shows it as a posted transaction by the financial institution?

This just seems very wrong to me, nobody else has commented, probably need to hit up Quicken support as I want to be able to manually enter transactions and have them properly accepted.

ronholl1

I deleted the transaction from 2/1 and it immediately inserted a placeholder (ADD SHARES) for last November, I backed up the file first and probably need to do it again as it seemed like a few things happened that I did not understand. Will try to document and figure out why this happened and how I might be able to avoid it in the future. Will update this when I have a chance to do such.

jacobs

I'm confused. You said you were entering transactions manually, right? Have you ever connected this account to your financial institution online? Placeholders come about when Quicken knows an ending balance (of dollars or shares) from connecting to a financial institution, and the transaction history in Quicken doesn't add up to that balance. But for an entirely manual account, Quicken doesn't know what the ending balance should be, so it should never be inserting a placeholder transaction. 

ronholl1

When I deleted the first BUY transaction from 2/1/2021, Quicken inserted an ADD Shares transaction for 11/1/2020, I have no idea why as I did not own this security until 2/1/2021. When I clicked on the ADD transaction, it said I had 100 Shares unaccounted for and had me add the BUY transaction, which I did and dated 2/1/2021.

That all said, it doesn't explain what happened to me.

Why was the BUY transaction downloaded from the financial institution from 2/1/2021 treated similar to a Placeholder?
Why won't this randomly happen in the future and how would I know? I noticed this because my balance was much lower than expected.
Is this working as expected or is there some bug that needs to be worked out by Quicken?

Appreciate all your assistance.

jacobs

I don't think there's any bug, just a problem with something in your data.

When Quicken doesn't know the cost/basis o something, it needs to create placeholder transactions to make the account match what the financial institution is reporting. Once you get all your transactions correct and eliminate the placeholders, you won't see this behavior any more. 

Since you said there are only 4 transactions for this security, you might try this approach instead of the whack-a-mole it sounds like you've been experiencing:

• Make a copy of your data file, so you can discard it if this makes things worse instead of better.
• Make sure you have a record of the 4 transactions — and then delete each of them.
• Since Quicken knows from your brokerage that you have shares of this security, it will likely have created one or more placeholder transactions. Will it let you delete them all, or all but one?
• Now, manually enter each of the transactions, from oldest to newest.
• the placeholder should go away, or you should be able to delete it.
• Do an online update so Quicken connects to your online account. Do your transactions remain unchanged, without creation of a new placeholder?